Wag the Dog

The making of Richard Nixon.

Richard and Pat Nixon with seven-year-old Tricia and five-year-old Julie and their cocker spaniel, Checkers, on the seashore of Mantoloking, New Jersey, August 15, 1953.Credit Photograph from AP

Richard and Pat Nixon, two essentially shy people who would now both be a hundred years old, first met onstage. Each had a role in the Whittier Community Players’ 1938 production of “The Dark Tower,” by George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott. Pat Ryan, a pretty twenty-five-year-old teacher at Whittier High, came to “The Dark Tower” with a smidgen of theatrical experience. Born in a Nevada mining-town shack and toughened by a hardworking childhood on a farm in Artesia, she had helped put herself through the University of Southern California with occasional jobs as a movie extra. But it wasn’t any real enthusiasm for the stage that brought her to the Community Players. As her daughter Julie explains in a biography of her mother, she went only because the assistant superintendent at Whittier High asked her to, and she “found it difficult to say no to a school administrator.” Nixon took to the whole business and several months later was back for more. At the urging of the Players’ director, he went on to appear in “Night of January 16th,” a melodrama by Ayn Rand in which the text itself chewed the scenery.

Pat Nixon, in later years, gave three memorably painful on-camera performances opposite Richard Nixon. In each of them, she was without lines of her own, but her mute, stricken countenance became an important part of the historical impression being created and preserved. On the last of these occasions, standing in the East Room of the White House on August 9, 1974, as her husband said farewell to his staff, she managed to avoid the tears that had flooded her eyes during a previous broadcast agony, her husband’s tentative concession to John F. Kennedy on Election Night, 1960.

But Pat Nixon’s presence and expression were most critical at the first of these televised displays, the one that took place at the El Capitan Theatre, in Los Angeles, on September 23, 1952. The surviving film of her husband’s “Checkers” speech shows her on-camera, her jaw supportively set, for only seconds each time, as Nixon rebuts the accusation imperilling his campaign for the Vice-Presidency on a ticket headed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. “SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY” was the New York Post’s headline a few days before. Not so, Nixon now argued, and more or less proved to the television audience, by laying out everything he and his wife owned and owed: “I have no life insurance whatever on Pat. . . . I owe 4,500 dollars to the Riggs Bank in Washington, D. C., with interest four and a half per cent. I owe 3,500 dollars to my parents. . . .”

Though he was nowhere near the theatre, Checkers, a canine present from a supporter, stole the show. “Regardless of what they say about it,” Nixon insisted of the dog, “we’re gonna keep it.” Checkers joined forces with Pat’s cloth coat (“I always tell her that she’d look good in anything”) to insure the candidate’s continued place on the ticket. Heartwarming or revolting—take your pick—the speech was indisputably effective, and it might never have been given at all had Pat Nixon not overridden her husband’s last-minute attack of stage fright. “I just don’t think I can go through with this one,” he told her three minutes before the camera’s red light went on. “Of course you can,” she replied, thereby extending his political life for more than two decades. The speech was a grand slam—Nixon celebrated its anniversary every year, even after Watergate—but Pat Nixon loathed politics from that televised moment on.

The origins of the Checkers episode can probably be traced to Nixon’s run-in with Earl Warren, the governor of California, who four years earlier had been Thomas E. Dewey’s running mate and sixteen years later swore in Richard Nixon as the thirty-seventh President of the United States. In the summer of 1952, Warren had positioned himself as a favorite-son candidate for President, but his control of the California delegation was threatened by Senator Nixon’s attempts to maneuver it into the Eisenhower camp. Two months after the Republican Convention, a still disgruntled Warren supporter may have leaked the story of Nixon’s “secret fund” to the Post.

Soon the much tonier New York Herald Tribune was chiming in, and causing Nixon’s biggest problems. Having long clamored for an Eisenhower nomination, this editorial avatar of liberal Republicanism now called for the General’s Vice-Presidential pick to get off the ticket. Advisers close to Eisenhower, ones much deeper inside the Party and financial establishments than the young, mortgaged, and stridently anti-Communist Senator, urged the same course. Eisenhower stayed largely silent on the matter for days, not even telephoning his running mate, though he did drop a quotable remark that Nixon would need to prove himself to be as “clean as a hound’s tooth” if he wanted to remain on the ballot. When the General finally did call, a thoroughly agitated Nixon told the architect of the Normandy landings that it was time to “shit or get off the pot.” By the conversation’s end, however, the General still wanted the Senator to go on television to explain the whole matter.

Eisenhower scarcely understood the power of the weaponry that he was inviting Nixon to bring onto the field. But a couple of Nixon’s allies, his bruising tactician Murray Chotiner and a political P.R. man named Robert Humphreys, instinctively grasped that television was about to alter politics as thoroughly as the nuclear option had recently changed military strategy. With money from various Republican campaign committees, they secured Nixon thirty minutes of airtime following Milton Berle on the Tuesday-night TV lineup. For the next couple of days, Nixon mostly secluded himself—already his customary crisis mode—and prepared. Then, shortly before the broadcast, a phone call from Governor Dewey, who, for all his establishment credentials, had been a real Nixon supporter, threw the candidate into a tailspin. Dewey regretted to tell him that Eisenhower’s closest aides believed the TV speech should conclude with Nixon’s resignation from the ticket. The candidate, as furious as he was shaken, hung up after instructing Dewey to tell everyone around Eisenhower that “I know something about politics, too!”

He also knew some oratorical tricks. Nixon’s speech was meant to be overly detailed—its disclosure of private financial minutiae was, he assured his audience, “unprecedented in the history of American politics”—but he also employed a technique perhaps picked up from some long-ago listening to Marc Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar. Before pointing out that Pat Nixon, who’d taught stenography at Whittier High, had often worked without pay in his Senate office, he informed viewers that his opponent for the Vice-Presidency, Alabama’s Senator John Sparkman, “does have his wife on the payroll. . . . That’s his business and I’m not critical of him for doing that. You will have to pass judgment on that particular point.”

Mostly, though, the speech laid out the humdrum economies of a man whose ambitions ran to political advancement, not wealth. “For four years we lived in an apartment in Park Fairfax in Alexandria, Virginia,” he declared. “The rent was eighty dollars a month.” The speech was so replete with specifics that Nixon wound up running out of the time that had been purchased from NBC. He did manage his bold stroke—telling viewers that they should write or wire the Republican National Committee with their opinion of whether he should remain on the ticket—but the network cut off this Hail Mary pass in mid-flight. Nixon didn’t have a chance to give out the R.N.C.’s address before NBC returned to its regularly scheduled programming.

The letters and telegrams and phone calls were vastly in his favor, and they somehow found their way to the committee. And yet Eisenhower seemed to continue his dithering. No decision came, and Nixon, feeling that he could take no more, composed a letter of resignation that Chotiner promptly ripped up. He told Nixon not to obey Eisenhower’s summons to come and discuss the situation in Wheeling, West Virginia, where the General was campaigning, but to go off to Missoula, Montana, and resume his own barnstorming. This was going rogue with a vengeance, and it worked. Nixon travelled to Wheeling only after he got assurances that he would remain on the ticket. The groundswell from the speech had by this time risen so high that Eisenhower went out to the Wheeling airport to tell his much younger partner, “You’re my boy.” Nixon, exhausted by the ordeal, was photographed weeping on the shoulder of California’s other senator, William Knowland, whom the Eisenhower campaign had been keeping close by as a possible replacement for its original choice of a running mate.

The Checkers episode is most often revisited from a poli-sci perspective, as a demonstration of TV’s sudden political significance; an alternative choice for television’s watershed moment is, of course, the debates that Nixon went on to have with John F. Kennedy in 1960. Checkers also tends to be used as evidence of Nixon’s sharp and shameless political instincts. Rarely, though, does this weeklong extreme adventure receive its narrative due.

Last fall, the playwright Douglas McGrath tried to rectify that at the Vineyard Theatre, in New York, presenting the story, in “Checkers,” as a kind of backstage drama. McGrath, who co-wrote “Bullets Over Broadway” with Woody Allen, framed the action from September of 1952 with scenes from 1966, when the twice-defeated Nixon is beginning to recognize that he’s got one more shot at the Presidency, thanks to the “botch Johnson has made of this war.” Murray Chotiner—shrewd, profane, and now endearing—is still around, wise to the ways of politics and of Nixon. The hard sell when it comes to running again is Pat. During the 1952 action, she’s played as a loving, doe-eyed, and mostly airheaded spouse who nonetheless senses that her husband’s television victory may be Pyrrhic. It leaves her prone to a number of genuine, if stiffly rhetorical, insights: “Resentment is not a good governing ideal.” (Both Nixon characters use variants of “twist slowly, slowly in the wind” two decades before John Ehrlichman earned his place in Bartlett’s with the phrase.)

“Checkers” lurches between comedy and drama and never settles deeply into either, but Nixon-haters who came to revel in an animated Herblock cartoon no doubt left the theatre disappointed. For all their growing disagreement, McGrath’s Dick and Pat are a love match, and as airtime approaches, a moment after Uncle Miltie signs off, one can scarcely help rooting for him to prevail. As played by Anthony LaPaglia, Nixon is physically awkward and prone to third-person self-reference (more a Bob Dole tic, actually), but he is also soft-spoken and no more than ordinarily profane. LaPaglia underplays the speech; Nixon’s own delivery, always available on YouTube, was a good deal more stagy.

If Watergate made it axiomatic that the coverup trumps the crime, the Checkers speech can be regarded as an occasion when a style of exculpation proved more memorable than the substance of an accusation. The “secret fund” was small potatoes: it amounted to about eighteen thousand dollars, given collectively by seventy-six donors, none of whom were permitted to contribute more than five hundred dollars. The money was used for such political purposes as mailing Christmas cards to supporters. The Post story—certainly its headline—was, in fact, a smear. Whatever the truth might be, millions on the left thought that the story was no better than Nixon deserved, certainly after his bullying treatment, during the 1950 Senate contest, of Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he’d described as “pink right down to her underwear.”

The Stevenson campaign seemed reluctant to exploit the fund revelation, probably because, as Chotiner surmised, the Democratic Presidential candidate had a fund of his own that could be made to appear even more questionable. The Nixon fund was audited in the days just before the candidate took to the airwaves. “Fifty lawyers and accountants worked on a round-the-clock basis,” Garry Wills writes in “Nixon Agonistes.” “No wrongdoing would be found.”

The most thorough reconstruction of the whole Checkers affair is now being offered in a book called “Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the ‘Rocking, Socking’ Election of 1952” (Bloomsbury). A few years ago, the author, Kevin Mattson, a professor at Ohio University, provided a similarly exhaustive, and generally supportive, treatment of Jimmy Carter’s crisis-born “malaise” speech from 1979. In this new work, Professor Mattson seems to believe that he’s again playing fair, summarizing Nixon’s response to the charges as a “bizarre mix of authenticity and performance art,” but the author’s thumb is never long off the side of the scale on which he piles up evidence of Nixon’s political and personal awfulness.

From his title, courtesy of Variety’s editorial about the speech, through his endnotes, Mattson has trouble avoiding a rote, ritualized contempt for Nixon. We are told that the Senator’s relationship with Whittaker Chambers was “the closest thing to a friendship either man could have” (so much for Bebe Rebozo), and that Nixon “had an early propensity for mouthwash,” as if being anti-halitoxic were some newly recognized ideological flaw. When Nixon is shown offering a whistle-stop crowd a fairly plainspoken explanation of why he chose to use political contributions rather than taxpayer money for certain expenses, Mattson notes, “Amazingly enough, the crowds cheered” the candidate’s “legalese.” In writing about the columnist Drew Pearson, the author discerns no double standard operating within these two sentences of his own: Pearson “saw a coarse ugliness entering Nixon’s campaign in its last leg. So he gathered his staff in his Georgetown house and renewed their efforts to dig up dirt about the vice-presidential candidate.” When Mattson hears an answer that’s different from the one he wants, he decides that his subject was evading the question, and on at least one occasion he makes a Nixon quotation mean the opposite of what was obviously intended:

[Norman Vincent Peale’s] The Power of Positive Thinking asked readers to embrace their internal salesmanship and overcome doubts. As Nixon explained, the fund crisis taught him that “it isn’t what the facts are but what they appear to be that counts when you are under fire.”

Mattson offers Nixon’s remark as a reference to the selling job he was doing in the Checkers speech. But if readers go back to the quotation’s original source—Earl Mazo’s sympathetic 1959 biography of Nixon—they will find that the Vice-President was referring to the appearance of the charges, not to any spin he used in refuting them. There is no mention of Peale.

Mattson’s book also makes some peculiar social assertions: “A country stabilizing its abundance and prosperity had started to define people by what they owned.” This is a thought that Jimmy Carter enunciated in his “malaise” speech. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns,” Carter said in 1979. Both Carter and Mattson find this change occurring in the years after the Second World War, though one might ask whether an earlier America, in which ownership of property determined the right to vote, and the property owned was sometimes human, hadn’t encouraged its citizens to define themselves by what they possessed rather more than the latter-day, tail-finned and hula-hooping country would. When it comes to Checkers himself, Mattson makes a pronouncement as startling as its grammar is shaky: “By 1952, acquiring a dog constituted a democratic rite of passage, no longer the exclusive possession of America’s wealthy aristocrats, who were known to prance around with their purebreds in places like the Upper East Side of Manhattan.” Who knew that, decades earlier, Penrod and Dorothy Gale had been putting on such airs when they took Duke and Toto out for a walk down the small-town lanes of Indiana and Kansas?

Despite all this dubious sociology, Mattson makes clear from the first page of “Just Plain Dick” that he would really rather be writing a novel. “If the brain waves of Richard Nixon,” he begins, “had been read between September 18 and 22, 1952, they might have gone like this.” What follows is a four-page italicized and wholly implausible internal monologue in which Nixon sounds like a cross between Andy Hardy and Bela Lugosi. Now and then, along the narrative way, this sort of fictionalizing takes over, minus a preposition or two: “That was good, Nixon thought as he combed further through the speech on the train and then the automobiles that took him to the Auditorium.” Mattson has a tendency to refer to the dramatis personae surrounding the protagonist by their first names, as if all of them—“Adlai” and “Drew” and “Mac” (General MacArthur)—were Facebook friends rather than figures in a work of history.

When Mattson does consent to work within the normal confines of nonfiction, he operates like an academic with dreams of a mass audience, or, at least, the hope of receiving teaching evaluations that will commend him as an especially with-it prof. He twice uses the word “bummer”; has characters being “pissed off” or “pissing off” others; and summarizes Nixon’s attitude toward Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, by stating, “Richard Nixon, for one, really hated the guy.” It’s all reminiscent of the flop-sweaty Nixon who went on “Laugh-In” during the 1968 campaign to ask, “Sock it to me?”

Mattson hints at a respectful longing for such bygone mandarins of the commentariat as Walter Lippmann and Stewart Alsop. But he seems more nostalgic for the quicksands of psycho-history, whose feverish vogue in the nineteen-eighties was much stimulated by the availability of Nixon as subject matter for scholars like Fawn Brodie. “By the evening of September 23,” Mattson writes, “Richard Nixon had become what J. D. Salinger called in The Catcher in the Rye a ‘madman.’ ” The author’s attempts to be fair are fleeting and obligatory; they appear almost like Post-it reminders to himself to give the other side a chance. The most generous passages try to see Nixon as “one of us,” to use the title of an admirably even-handed biography from 1991 by the liberal columnist Tom Wicker. Drawing a contrast between Ike (“a great man”) and Nixon (“an everyman”), Mattson portrays the latter as being “like the post-war strivers and strugglers . . . looking to buy a house in the suburbs and to own a car, radio, and television set and to get on with life. They were not the great men. They belched and cussed.” When, presumably, they weren’t swigging mouthwash. There is something to what Mattson says, of course—and it helps to remind us why there were Nixon Democrats even before 1960, let alone 1972—but the “one of us” view of Nixon has always had its own tinge of pathology, making “us” the head case, a crudely aspirational people with our minds on the crabgrass instead of the dawn.

Garry Wills wrote that after Checkers there “would never be any trust” between Eisenhower and Nixon. But the two men’s relationship after the fund crisis had a dozen shifting dimensions, each of them now done narrative and analytical justice by Jeffrey Frank in “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage” (Simon & Schuster). “Over years of casual familiarity, Eisenhower’s view of Nixon kept changing—from the disdain that he felt for most professional politicians to doubts about Nixon’s ‘maturity’ to a kind of hesitant respect,” Frank writes. “Nixon’s feelings about the general could change, too—from neediness and even awe to rare bursts of hateful rage, as when he called him a ‘goddamned old fool,’ or by one account, ‘a senile old bastard.’ ” If Frank, a former editor at this magazine, adds modestly to our understanding of Eisenhower, he contributes enormously to our comprehension of his Vice-President; this is, in fact, one of the best books ever written about Richard Nixon. Despite his second billing, it is the younger man whose point of view and agonies dominate the story. If Ike seems at times as vaporous and ungraspable as Ronald Reagan, Nixon is nothing but edges, endlessly available to capable hands; in the end, knowable.

Nixon and Eisenhower shared a certain “duplicity” and came from similar parents, “devout mothers . . . and short-tempered fathers,” but Ike was a much cooler customer, sometimes to the point of what Frank calls “casual cruelty.” The twenty-two-year age difference between the two, further increased by the stature gap, ruled out any easy bonding when Nixon was presented to the General, by Ike’s advisers, almost the way Checkers showed up in a shipping crate. Eisenhower didn’t like the hearty lèse-majesté with which Nixon grabbed and raised his patron’s arm for the photographers on the Convention rostrum. But Nixon’s little gaffes mattered less than the quick study he made of his boss in the months that followed; he came to understand not only Ike’s vanity but his own superior instincts for “raw political combat.”

Once they were in office, the Vice-President worked hard to please. He took up golf; became a thoughtful contributor to Cabinet meetings; did the dirty work of the 1954 mid-term campaign; travelled around the world; and handled any number of social obligations that Eisenhower preferred to skip for quiet evenings at home with Mamie. After the President’s heart attack, in 1955, without any guidance from a Twenty-fifth Amendment, Nixon improvised his way toward the sweet spot between reluctance and assertiveness. Murray Chotiner sensed “opportunity” in the health crisis, but Nixon was smart enough not to overplay his hand. John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State who could remember Woodrow Wilson’s incapacity from a stroke, was permanently impressed.

But Eisenhower seemed less so. The lengthiest torment of Nixon’s Vice-Presidency was the possibility of being dumped from the ticket in 1956. Eisenhower suggested that Nixon might be better prepared for an eventual Presidency by running the Pentagon in a second Eisenhower term. The suggestion may have been sincere, in the light of Ike’s military frame of reference, but it was also typically passive-aggressive. In January of 1956, the President would not allow Nixon to attend a political-strategy dinner with the Administration’s most important players: “Ordinarily you would be the first one I would ask,” Eisenhower explained to him. But “since you are going to be so much the object of conversation, it would be embarrassing to you.”

For months to come, the situation seemed an endless replay of the General’s indecision during Checkers; but in the end, as Frank demonstrates, Nixon “outmaneuvered” his boss for the second time. He even quietly condoned a write-in effort on his own behalf in the New Hampshire primary, which garnered a surprising number of votes and sent his stock upward. If read along with the most recent volume by Robert Caro, Frank’s book makes plain that Richard Nixon was never as daunted by Dwight D. Eisenhower as Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was by John F. Kennedy.

Nixon’s second Vice-Presidential term was a long waiting game interrupted by an Eisenhower health emergency even more serious than the heart attack. In November, 1957, the President suffered a stroke that left him, for a brief period, incoherent and enraged with frustration. Resignation was in the air; the New York Post, Nixon’s early scourge, editorialized that Eisenhower should quit and make way for his Vice-President. Nixon again demonstrated competence and restraint, winning praise even from such liberals as Lippmann and James Reston. “It was no longer easy to regard him merely as the pitiless bastard who had befouled Helen Gahagan Douglas in his 1950 Senate campaign and seemed suspiciously in league with the party’s McCarthyite wing,” Frank writes.

Yet Nixon never seemed able to cross some final threshold with Eisenhower. The President’s famous remark, during a press conference in the 1960 campaign, that he might be able to think of a major contribution Nixon had made to the Administration “if you give me a week,” may have reflected his own decreasing mental agility, but it came after an endorsement that had been much delayed and was somewhat wan. Eisenhower didn’t do much campaigning for his designated successor, and he wouldn’t so much as deflect a little defense spending to areas where it might do Nixon some electoral good. After Kennedy’s narrow win, Eisenhower offered tone-deaf consolation to Nixon and Pat. The Democratic victor agreed to participate in a televised tribute to the outgoing President before Nixon could bring himself to.

Only in Eisenhower’s last years, which mostly coincided with Nixon’s long period in the “wilderness,” did there develop anything like warmth between the two men. Perhaps Nixon’s having shrunk back into his britches helped. But Eisenhower did want to remain connected, and he even campaigned for his former Vice-President during Nixon’s unwise run for the California governorship, in 1962, against the incumbent, Pat Brown. When that, too, ended in defeat, Ike sympathized to some extent with Nixon’s last press-conference denunciation of the media (“You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more”).

For a while after that, as he practiced law in New York, Nixon became more like Ike’s usual friends. “He was earning a great deal of money,” Frank points out, “and would not have felt out of place among the wealthy middle-aged men who had surrounded President Eisenhower.” Eventually, through the marriage of Nixon’s daughter and Ike’s grandson, the two men became in-laws. Eisenhower thought that Julie and David, whom Frank calls “a somewhat out-of-time couple,” were rushing things; Nixon worried that any wedding just before the 1968 election would look like a political stunt; and John Eisenhower, the father of the groom, believed that the Nixons were “social-climbing” with the marriage. That didn’t stop him, the following year, from accepting Nixon’s appointment as Ambassador to Belgium.

Eisenhower died at Walter Reed Army Hospital two months after Nixon’s Inauguration. The new President eulogized him at the Capitol and wept when departing the Rotunda. Frank believes this can be explained by “Nixon’s continuing sadness at never having been admitted to the general’s small, rarely expanded circle, the one that he reserved for friends.” If this is the one point of “Ike and Dick” that seems reductive, that’s because Frank has already assembled a panoply of additional reasons for those ambivalent tears. Curiously, the author does not mention that on the night before Nixon announced his resignation from the Presidency, five years later, he reassured those who were worried that he might lose his composure by saying that he hadn’t cried since Eisenhower died.

Frank takes pains to avoid not only the auto-denunciations of so many left-leaning Nixon biographers but also the mawkish fealty of a smaller biographical band on the right. This intellectual restraint extends to the book’s form. Unlike Mattson, Frank does not surrender to any temptation to novelize, even though he is a novelist, the author of a well-regarded “Washington trilogy” that includes “The Columnist” (2001). “Ike and Dick” shows how much life remains in artfully straightforward narrative history. It’s done here with an old-fashioned sharpness of eye (“Mamie Eisenhower shared some of her fur wrap with Pat Nixon”) and a springiness of phrasing: Frank calls Nixon’s rumination on all the reasons to run or not to run in 1968 “a slightly narcissistic workout,” since there was never any doubt about the decision he would reach.

Milton Eisenhower expressed gladness that his brother “did not live to see the things [Nixon] did” toward the end of his time in the White House, and Frank finds it “natural to wonder whether Watergate and all of its tributaries would ever have materialized if the patriarch had lived beyond the first two months of the Nixon presidency.” But readers of “Ike and Dick” may find their own minds dialling things back to Eisenhower’s stroke, in 1957, in order to speculate about what might have happened had Ike, instead of Dick, become the first President ever to resign.

Nixon would have reached the Presidency a dozen years sooner, at the age of forty-four. He would have arrived in the Oval Office misshapen by politics, to be sure, as a bruising campaigner who’d been forced to balance his checkbook on live TV and then spend five years trying to figure out the ways of a maddening boss whom everybody else seemed to love. But he would not have undergone the psychological damage of two crushing defeats that still lay ahead, and he would not have been presiding over a country at war in Southeast Asia and with itself. If that had happened, who knows what this gifted, knotted-up man, this “one of us,” might have spared himself, and his wife, and every other one of us? ♦

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